ENGLISH ETCHINGS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 6572, 9 December 1882, Page 1 (Supplement)

ENGLISH ETCHINGS.

fBY OCR TRAVILLIXG CONTRIBUTOR. J

A KENTISH VILLAGE. You must get well away from a railway, in the heart of oni; of the rural counties of England, in order to perceive and appreciate the tranquillity and unchangeableness of the current of existence, as it flows onward, with scarcely a ripple upon its placid surface, iu such a sequestered locality ; as also to understand the reluctance with which the labouring classes entertain the idea of emigration. A colonist, accustomed U- the firvtrish activity of a new country, would be iifit, to characterise the calmness of life in a secluded village, like that from which I write, as stagnation ; just aa the bright, transparent stream that flows through it, and refloats upon its stainless face the imimimorial trees that grow upon its banks, aud the white weather-boarding of the dusty mill that intercepts its current and employs it aa a motive po-ver, appears to be without motion, whereas it is gliding evenly and blowly on towards the river Medway, which will conduct its waters to the never-resting sea. It is not stagnation, however, but repO3e ; and the charm of it is heightened by the remarkable contrast it presents to the restlessness, the rawness, the ruggedness, and the almost painful newness and crudity of an Australian township, which lias sprung up with something like the suddenness of a mushroom in the night. A man back, after thirty or forty years absence in a far distant country, to the place of his birth, to

The limit of his narrower fate. While ye: beside it< vocal springs. He- played at counsellors and kings. With one that was his earliest mate ; Who ploughs with p»in his native lea, And reaps tho labour of his hands. Or iD the furrow musing stands ; " Docs ni} old friend remember me ?"

And, excepting that time has sprinkled its snows upon the head of that early companion ; that the children have grown into men and women; that many of the older folk arc mouldering beneath the tuif; and that those who were iniddle-ayed have fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, he finds but little change. The one butcher's shop stands in tiie old place, shadowed by the same old tree, which, perhaps, is somewhat greater in the girth of its wrinkled bole, anil somewhat iuller in branch and leaf. The one little grocery and drapery store occupies its accustomed place, just opposite the church ; aud the carrier's cart sets out for the county town on market days from tho same yard and from underneath the same shed which sheltered it, or its predecessor, half a century ago. The quiet meadows and the cheery orchards round the mill are unchanged, and so is every detail of the old familiar place—

The sleepy pool above the dam, The pool beneath it uever still. The iueal-sai-ks on the wkitep'd floor. The very air about the lioor M.ule misty with the floating meal. It is the same with the village inn. Over it swings tin.' faded sign of the Chequers, which has creaked upon its rusty hinges, summer and winter, for possibly a hundred years : and inside the taproom stand the veneiable settles, brown with age, and somewhat shaky withal, upon which three or four generations of rustic folk have sat, aud talked, aud sung, as the old October ale loosened their tongues and quickened their sluggish intellects. Over the wide capacious fireplace still stands the glass-case containing the stulled figure of the wonderful trout which was caught in the mill-stream, a. l>. ISOj, and weighing I don't know how many pounds, and looking as if its ecales had been varnished, and its eyes were starting from its head. And this piscatorial prodigy has for its companions the engraved portraits of their gracious Majesties King Ueorgc the Third "and Queen Charlotte, both of which are as yellow as a spatlu guinea. The old beer-engine stands in its old place in the bar, aud wheezes asthmatieally at times, just as it used to do in the days that are gene. There are more names carved oil the horse-trough in front than there used to be ; and the only change that you notice about the place is that it has somehow shrunk. The roof is not ao high, nor the door so wide, nor the windows so large, nor the rooms so capacious, nor the road so broad, nor the passage from the entry to the bar so lung as they used to be. But, then, everything else appears contracted, too, from the ?p:rc upon the village church and the clockface that juts out from one side of the steeple to the cowls upon the oast-houses ; from the dimensions of the aged yew tree in the churchyard to the area of the village itself. All appears to have undergone a process of compression aud diminution, not excepting the thickets, in which, aa you remember,

The cuckoo tnld hi? name to all the hills ; Tho mellow i.u-el llutcil in the elm : The red-cap wi.iitle.i; ami the mffhtinjrile >anf 1..U I, as tho , ho were iliu binl ct day. What strikes you moat, in coming back to such a place, is that the village itself and al! around it are so old. Tile very moss that has accumulated on the weather-stained thatch of a barn that has stood at the corner of Wella-s-trcet fioru time immemorial, and the ivy that has folded the Hint walls of the venerable, church in a warm and clinging embrace, are reverend with iuiti'iuity. So are the stone crop aud the house leek on the brown-red cottage roofs. The cobble-stones upon the rugged and uneven footpath have been worn smooth by the feet of many generations, and the liquid fall of tho wayside spring, trickling into a stone basin, from whence (he water is conveyed by the village children in large brown pitchers to the houses close by, has made the same music in their ears for centuries. The church clock, which " beats out the little lives of men," has looked down upon infants being carried, in the whitest of robes, through the porch to the font, and upon these same infants, grown to man and womanhood, passing beneath the archway to the altar, and upon the bride and bridegroom borne, in due time, beneath a black velvet pall, to their last resting-place among " the stones that name the underlying dead." And the villagers are so closely linked, by old association, with the past, and by the ties of kindred and of friendship with the present, and by U3a and custom with all their immediate surroundings, both personal aud scenic, that it is scarcely to be wondered at if they adhere tenaciously to the place of their birth, with ita email certainties, its limited possibilities, its restricted horizon, and its contracted aspirations. The new world to which we colonists belong is far distant, mysterious, and unknown. It is separated from the liiclher country by what appears to the rustic mind to be an enormous interval of ocean, and the voyage thither is surrounded, to !iis imagination, with risks and perils of more than ordinary magnitude. If these were successfully surmounted, there is the strangeness of a new land, aud the uncertainty of employment in it operating as deterrents. And, to encounter these, aiiall h>; separate himself from those among whom he has grown up from childhood, with whom he lias lived and laboured, and to whom he haa been indebted very often for that neighbourly help and kindly counsel or succour which the poor are always so ready to extend to ono another? These are the ijuestions which he asks himself, when the subject of emigration is presented to his ov.-n mind, either by the pressure of necessity or by the suggestion of others ; and, all tilings considered, it is by no means surprising that he bhould recoil from giving it practical effect. Meanwhile his life in his native village is as mechanical and monotonous as is that of the rest of his class, who

Cle-ive tlic soil, How the fc d, r.nd the harvest with enduring toil.

At the end of the vista there may be nothing butter thau the Union workhouse; and when death comes to him in a ripe old it is as when

The full-juiced apjilc, tvnxins; ovcr-mcllow, Drops in a ulcnt autumn night. And his bones are laid to rest with those of his forefathers

iiene.ith the clover soil, That take* the hunshino anrt the ruin: Or where iLo kneeling huuilel drains, The cluUicu of Ills God.

It is only when you return to England, and revisit the localities with which you were famdiar in early life, that you understand the aud durability of the ties that bind a mau to the scenes and the inanimate oiijects upon which he first opened his eyes, and amidst which his frame aud mind and character were formed. .Each of these ties may be individually as thiu and fragile as the separate portions of the Lilliputian cordage which bound Gulliver to the earth, when the pigmies toek. advantage of his slumbers to make him prisoner, but 00llectively they are very powerful indeed. In the case of the manufacturing operative

and of the town artisan, whose local attachments are few and feeble, and who haa probably migrated from the country to the town, comparatively little difficulty is experienced in convincing them of the advantages of emigration, and in detaching them from the districts they inhabit. But the farm-labourer is slow to believe in the possibility of bettering his condition, reluctant to quit the neighbourhood in which he waa brought up, aud hard to convince, either by facts or arguments, that he may become a land-owner in the new world. Added to this, it is important to bear in mind that he is much better oil than he need to be, that his earnings have nearlydoubled within the last forty years, and that he i.s no longer a supplicant for employment, but can negotiate with the fanner ujjou something like equal terms.